Conventional retail stores (“brick and mortar” stores) present music to consumers inefficiently. When a consumer goes to a retail store to purchase music, for example, “Blockbuster”™ (Registered Trademark), the consumer has a limited number of choices to search for music. One reason for the limited number of choices is that conventionally music is classified only in a restricted number of classes. For example, music may be stored at a retail store under the name of the artists, genre (Rock, Blues, Jazz etc.), label, and title of the album, etc. Conventional retailers do not have a mechanism that allows consumers to search for music based upon music content.
The advent and popularity of the Internet has created numerous opportunities for retailers to conduct business in the electronic arena (“E-commerce”). Today, E-commerce is a viable business option and music can easily be sold via the Internet.
The Internet connects thousands of computers world wide into a vast network using well-known protocols, for example, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/Internet Protocol (IP). Information on the Internet is stored world wide as computer files, mostly written in the Hypertext Mark Up Language (“HTML”). The collection of all such publicly available computer files is known as the World Wide Web (WWW).
The WWW is a multimedia-enabled hypertext system used for navigating the Internet and is made up of hundreds of thousands of web pages with audio, images, text and video files. Each web page can have connections to other pages, which may be located on any computer connected to the Internet.
A typical Internet user uses a client program called a “Web Browser” to connect to the Internet. A user can connect to the Internet via a proprietary network, such as America Online or CompuServe, or via an Internet Service Provider, e.g., Earthlink. A Web Browser may run on any computer connected to the Internet. Currently, various browsers are available of which two prominent browsers are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. The Web Browser receives and sends requests to a web server and acquires information from the WWW. A web server is a program that, upon receipt of a request, sends the requested data to the requesting user.
A standard naming convention known as Uniform Resource Locator (“URL”) has been adopted to represent hypermedia links and links to network services. Most files or services can be represented with a URL. URLs enable Web Browsers to go directly to any file held on any WWW server.
Information from the WWW is accessed using well-known protocols, including the Hypertext Transport Protocol (“HTTP”), the Wide Area Information Service (“WAIS”) and the File Transport Protocol (“FTP”), over TCP/IP protocol. The transfer format for standard WWW pages is Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
The advent and progress of the Internet has changed the way consumers buy or listen to music. Consumers today can download digital music via the Internet using MPEG 3 technology, with a click of a mouse. Audio delivery techniques have also made it easy to stream audio from a website to a consumer, upon demand. A typical music listener can download audio files from the WWW, store the audio files, and listen to music.
Although the progress in Web technology allows consumers to download music easily, a consumer buying music on line is still limited by the same constraints facing a consumer who buys music at a brick and mortar store i.e., limited number of search techniques for searching music and lack of content based music search techniques. Therefore, commercial retail music environment whether electronic or brick and mortar, suffer from the same drawbacks.
Hence what is needed is a business method that will efficiently present music to a consumer based upon the consumer's preferences and allow the consumer to search for music based upon music content.